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Wednesday, 31 May 2017

The indisputable highlight of the BBC Election debate that Theresa May chickened out of, was the moment when her human bullet shield Amber Rudd caused hilarity when she tried to defend the Tories' shambolic uncosted manifesto by saying "judge us by our record".

The productivity crisisThe UK is suffering an extreme crisis in relative productivity. The UK lags 35% behind Germany and 30% behind the US. This means that the average UK worker has to work an hour to achieve the same economic output as a German can manage in 39 minutes. The problem is getting worse and worse, and it's easy to understand why. Unhappy and exploited workers don't work as hard as those who feel valued and well paid. Well educated workers are more effective workers than those who have suffered a poor education system. If the UK wants to resolve the productivity crisis it needs to improve wages and working conditions and invest in the education system. The Tories have been doing the polar opposite of that for seven years.

Corporations paying less tax than their employeesSince 2010 the Tories have reduced the rate of corporation tax paid by the biggest multinationals from 28% to 20%. They plan to cut it even further to just 17% by 2020. This means that the UK has one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the developed world. The global average is 27% and the G7 average is 33.4%. Theresa May has threatened to reduce the corporation tax rate even further too. Labour would reverse the corporation tax cuts and bring the UK back into line with other advanced nations.

Unqualified teachersIn 2010 the Tories changed the rules and scrapped the requirement that teachers actually be qualified to do the job. Since then the education system has been flooded with ever more unqualified teachers, rising to 22,500 by 2015. It's worth remembering that the education secretary who brought in the policy of flooding our schools with unqualified teachers was Michael Gove, you know, the guy who claimed that the UK has "had enough of experts" during the EU referendum campaign.

Fire service cutsBetween 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed 30% off the fire service budget resulting in the loss of 10,000 firefighter jobs and the closure of 39 fire stations. Between 2015 and 2020 they intend to slash another 20%. In 2015/16 the number of fire deaths increased by 17.4%.Prisons chaosViolence, riots, widespread drug use, escapes, chronic understaffing and soaring suicide rates. The UK prison system is in chaos. One of the worst prisons of all is HMP Northumberland that was privatised by the Tories in 2014. It's supposed to be a training prison to give prisoners jobs skills so they're less likely to return to crime. At HMP Northumberland a private contractor Novus was giving prisoners pictures of Peppa Pig to colour in as their employability training, all at the taxpayers' expense of course.Unfair dismissal feesIn 2013 the Tory led government introduced £1,200 fees in order for employees to seek unfair dismissal compensation from their employers. So now if your boss sacks you unfairly (for your age, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, political orientation, trade union activities, or refusal to suck his cock) you have to find over a grand in order to go to an employment tribunal. The Tory presumption of course being that your boss is a great guy and all of his employees are worthless scum, and the fewer people who take him to tribunal the better. The person who came up with these fees is a major Tory party donor called Adrian Beecroft who also runs the payday loan company Wonga (which would obviously benefit from a significant increase in the number of people being unfairly dismissed and priced out of seeking compensation). Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to remove this economic barrier to justice by scrapping employment tribunal fees.

Sweetheart tax dealsOne of the sickest things about the Tory government is the way they allowed HMRC to draw up sweetheart tax deals with massive corporations like Google, Starbucks and Vodafone. Why should Google get to negotiate a 3% tax deal when ordinary working people have to pay what they actually owe?

Democracy under threatThe proposed Tory Great Repeal Bill is an astounding assault on the concept of democracy and accountability. If this bill passes it will give Tory government ministers the ability to rewrite tens of thousands of UK laws with no parliamentary scrutiny. If people supported Brexit because the EU is too undemocratic, it would take an astounding display of doublethink them to now be supporting Theresa May and the biggest anti-democratic assault on the UK in history that they're planning.

In-Work benefit cutsThe majority of people receiving non-pension benefits in Tory Britain are the working poor, not the unemployed. When the Tories slash things like housing benefit and tax credits, what they're actually doing is further impoverishing the working poor. Incredibly they have repeatedly introduced new welfare cuts to make working families poorer whilst simultaneously spouting the Orwellian propaganda that they're "making work pay" as they do it!The trade deficitThe UK is suffering a massive problem with trade deficits. This means the UK imports far more than it exports. The problem has been going on for a long time, but since 2010 the problem has been getting a lot worse, with the record being smashed over and again. In the month of the Brexit referendum the trade deficit in goods swelled to an astonishing £12.5 billion, the highest ever recorded. The UK's terrible balance of payments deficit is offset a bitby financial services export and vehicle exports, but a Tory hard Brexit would throw a massive spanner in the works, especially if they go for the "no deal" cliff edge strop Theresa May has been threatening.Contempt for human rightsTheresa May has a burning contempt for your human rights. She has expressed her determination to tear up the European Convention on Human Rights on many occasions, and join Belarus as the only European nation that doesn't adhere to the human rights legislation that was bestowed on Europe by the British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.

Just in case you're not convinced by the 40 (carefully sourced) things I've listed here, listen to Mark McGowan's reaction when Theresa May used this "judge us on our record" line earlier in the election campaign:

If you judge the Tories by their unspeakably dismal record in government then there's no justification for voting Tory at all (unless you're one of the super-rich elitists who have doubled your wealth thanks to the Tories rigging the economy in your favour).

The only reason they say words like "judge us on our record" is that they're assuming that the British public are too intellectually lazy to actually judge their political record, and instead simply assume that the record must be good because they're boasting about it.

Perhaps we're not quite as thick as the Tories assumed us to be?

We'll find out in a few days ...

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Theresa May's latest excuse for chickening out of the election debate is the most ridiculous yet.

When confronted by journalists about why she was refusing to appear in the debates, she did a crackpot forced laugh, then tried to claim that Jeremy Corbyn is at fault for wanting to appear on the telly (as if putting yourself and your views before public scrutiny is some kind of abominable thing for a political leader to do), and that he should be paying more attention to "thinking about Brexit negotiations".

There's so much wrong with this excuse it's absurd.

The ticking clock

Firstly, and most obviously, if Theresa May was so concerned about the importance of Brexit negotiations, then she would never have called this self-serving snap-election in the first place.

How is it even possible for her to think the public are thick enough to buy her excuse that Brexit negotiations are suddenly so incredibly important to her, when she decided to put the negotiations on hold for two months to do this election when she thought she had an unassailable poll lead?

How does setting the clock ticking on the most complex and risky set of negotiations and then calling a two month holiday in order to conduct a totally self-serving snap election demonstrate anything other than contempt for the seriousness of the situation we're facing?

Amber Rudd

If the idea of appearing before the public is such a laughable concept, why on earth has Theresa May decided to send the Home Secretary Amber Rudd in her place?

If the concept is contemptible, then just boycott it. If it's not such a waste of time appear yourself.

This halfway solution is yet another demonstration of directionless leadership. She decided not to go, then instead of admit she was wrong and actually turn up, she's sending one of her underlings to act as her human bullet shield.

She's too cowardly too appear herself because she knows she'd get eviscerated, but she's too directionless to stick by her decision so she's sending out Amber Rudd to take all the criticism on her behalf.

That forced laugh

Perhaps Theresa May's image consultants have told her to try to lighten up a bit because her snarky and brittle persona is putting people off?

We all remember that bonkers shoulders-back fake laugh she did at Prime Ministers' Questions. She looks completely deranged when she puts on a laugh, so forced laughter hardly seems to be a sensible approach.

What else can she do though. Staring furiously, angrily shaking her head when she's presented with facts she doesn't like, and launching into furious rants when things aren't going her way are hardly mannerisms that are going to win people over.

The transparency of her false laugh is perhaps the strongest indication of why she won't appear in the live debates. She doesn't want people to see how her scripted persona is completely fake as she descends into either crackpot displays of faux hilarity, or furious snarky jabbering.

Why should Corbyn be preparing Brexit negotiations?

The idea that Jeremy Corbyn is wasting his time subjecting himself to public scrutiny because he should be preparing for the Brexit negotiations is an extremely odd argument for Theresa May to make.

The only way to interpret May's words is that she thinks Corbyn is actually going to win the election, otherwise why on earth would he need to concentrate on his Brexit negotiating stance, instead of reaching out to members of the public?Watch it for yourself

Just look at the state of it. This cowardly and directionless woman isn't fit to run a bath, let alone a country.

If she thinks Corbyn should spend more time prepping for Brexit negotiations she must think he'll be prime minister. pic.twitter.com/m7W3DkGv5N

Tuesday, 30 May 2017

The results of the latest ICM poll paint an extraordinary picture of a shocking inter-generational divide.

Just look at the graph in the header image and consider the fact that Labour are outperforming the Tories by almost 5:1 amongst the younger generation, who see Jeremy Corbyn's transformational investment based manifesto as a beacon of hope for a future with decent opportunities after seven bleak and ruinous years of Tory asset stripping.

Obviously not all pensioners are intent on voting for a dystopian future where the aspirations of the young are crushed and the assets of the old are asset stripped in order to fund tax cuts for very wealthiest in society, but a huge majority are.

The reasons why are not clear cut and identical for all elderly Tory voters, but here are two of the big ones.

Echo chambers

The first big reason is that the older generations are very much more likely to be stuck in a mainstream media echo chamber, where their only sources of political news are the television, a single (incredibly biased) newspaper or their favourite radio station.

Independent media simply has no way to reach the large percentage of pensioners who don't even have access to the Internet, let alone social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Mainstream journalists often talk derisively about social media echo chambers, and the problem of selection bias on social media is undoubtedly a real one ... but anyone who thinks that people who use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are suffering a worse echo chamber problem than those who only ever rely on mainstream media for their news has got the situation so ridiculously backwards it's beyond parody.

Mental decline

There's no polite or politically correct way to put this so I'm just going to come out and say it (with evidence to back it up of course): The older people get on average, the more gullible they are, the crapper their mathematical abilities, the more they're likely to over-estimate their own expertise, and the more attracted to right-wing authoritarian leaders they become.

The Online Privacy Foundation carried out some very interesting analysis into the political psychology of the 2016 EU referendum vote. You can view the results here.

People like to think it's the young who are gullible and naive, but the research shows that the wisdom of old age is a total myth. Once you start getting older, you start becoming ever more susceptible to believing in ridiculous economic fairy stories and mathematical jiggery-pokery.One other thing that the research shows is that older people are very much more likely to suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This is the problem that people with a very limited understanding of a subject are liable to significantly overestimate their level of expertise, while actual experts are liable to underestimate their level of expertise (the more you know, the more you realise you don't know too).

The older people get, the more likely it is that they end up as a blowhard know-it-all on all subjects, even subjects they actually know next to nothing about.

Obviously not all old people suffer this kind of mental decline (the best ways to avoid this kind of mental decline are mental and physical exercise, a good diet, and avoiding brain cell wrecking substances like alcohol as much as possible) but on average most people do end with declining cognitive abilities.

Most older people end up losing their ability to critique the things they're told, seriously over-estimating their own expertise, and craving harsh dictatorial right-wing governance.

What we can do

The only way we can try to stop the older generations from wrecking the aspirations of their children and grandchildren is to talk to them.

We have to try to bridge the generational divide by getting them to rekindle the skeptical abilities they had in their youth.

We have to try to make them understand that the majority of the mainstream media, and especially the right-wing dominated newspapers are trying to con them into voting for the Tories.

Conscientiousness

Older people tend to suffer significant mental decline, but one hugely important thing that really stands in older people's favour is that they are very much more likely to be conscientious. They're far more likely to care about other people, behave selflessly, and put other people's needs above their own.

Appealing to older people's-interest is a reasonable strategy. Telling them that the Tories are going to rip them off by scrapping their winter fuel payments, abandoning the triple lock, and asset stripping them if they get ill and need social care might work.

However the cynical Tories know that they're more likely to be conscientious, so they've dressed these ideologically driven economic assaults against pensioners up as necessary sacrifices for the greater good. The Tories are so depraved that they know older people can be tricked into accepting massive personal impoverishment by telling them it's for the greater good, rather than a way of funding yet another round of lavish tax breaks for corporations and the super-rich (as it actually is).

If you're going to try to appeal to an older person's self interest, it's absolutely vital that you make sure they understand that the Tories are lying through their teeth: That the cuts aren't for the greater good at all, but actually a way of funding even more giveaways for the millionaires and billionaires.

Probably a much better way of appealing to older people is to talk about the significant differences the Labour manifesto makes for the younger generations, their own grandchildren.

Talk about how the Tories are going to scrap free school meals and slash education funding so the kids of today have worse opportunities than previous generations of children.

Talk about student debts. Explain that tuition fees in the UK are the highest in the whole world, and that nearly all the good jobs need a degree these days. Tell them that an incredible 70% of today's students will never be able to actually pay off their student debts despite paying a 9% tax for their entire working lives.

Talk about exploitative zero hours contracts and how they represent a modern incarnation the unstable employment days of the 1930s where dockers and steelworkers waking up at the crack of dawn to queue at the gates in the desperate hope of being called to work, and having to go home with absolutely nothing if their name wasn't picked.

Help them understand that the Tories aren't just taking wealth from the older generations, they're robbing wealth and opportunities from the younger generations too, just to stuff the already bulging the pockets of the super-rich elitists who totally bankroll the Tory party.Give them a copy of the Labour Manifesto to read, and ask them to consider it for themselves. Tell them that you really like it, and that they should disregard what the Tories and the mainstream media say about it and judge it for themselves.

Good luck

The only way the Tories can be stopped from getting a whopping great majority, with which they can rob all generations in order to line the pockets of their super-rich mates, is if we all talk to our parents and grandparents and plead with them to disbelieve the Tory lies, think of themselves, and above all think of their grandchildren's futures.

Good luck.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

They hate his policies so much they're absolutely fixated on trying to destroy his reputation with anything they've got, and his early involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process is seriously the best they can come up with, because they know it feeds into the anti-Irish bigotry that still unfortunately exists in Great Britain.

In this article I'm going to set the record straight by detailing 9 things that every voter should know about the Corbyn-IRA smear campaign.1. Condemning the IRA bombings (part one)When Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed by Sophy Ridge during the 2017 election campaign he clearly condemned the IRA bombings, but the Tories outright lied that he didn't.

The right-wing propagandists really seem to believe that people will mindlessly lap up their reality-reversing lies rather than quickly checking things for themselves (see video)

Anyone who says that Jeremy Corbyn has "never" condemned the IRA bombings is lying through their teeth. In 1994 Corbyn signed a parliamentary motion on the 20th anniversary of the IRA pub bombing in Birmingham which described the attack as a deplorable terrorist atrocity.

Adams and McGuinness were not the IRA, they were leaders of the democratic political party Sinn Féin, which is the political wing of the Irish Republican movement, not the now-disbanded terrorist faction.

People who share these pictures are either so blinded by anti-Irish bigotry that they can't differentiate between a political party and a terrorist organisation, or they know the difference perfectly well, but they're sharing the pictures in order to feed into the anti-Irish bigotry of people they consider to gullible and easily led.

4. Peacemaker

In 2013 Jeremy Corbyn was awarded the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award for his efforts to bring about a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. You can read his acceptance speech here.

5. The LoyalistsThe right-wing smear merchants are always desperate to bring up the fact that Corbyn met with Irish republicans, but they're a lot more reticent about the fact he also met plenty of Loyalists too in his campaign for peace. Corbyn met with Gary McMichael and David Ervine (Ervine was a jailed loyalist terrorist turned politician for the PUP), and he also spoke regularly with Ian Paisley who, according to his widow Eileen, considered Corbyn to be "likeable", "courteous", "polite" and "a gentleman".

In light of the indisputable fact that Ian Paisley was a fierce opponent of Irish republicanism, why on earth would he say such things about a guy, who according to the Tory smears, was undermining the loyalist cause by promoting a peaceful solution to the conflict?6. Openness vs SecrecyCorbyn spoke openly to Irish republicans and Ulster Loyalists during the 1980s. Nobody is denying that.

People who attack Corbyn for openly talking peace, whilst refusing to condemn Thatcher's secret negotiations with the IRA, or the succession of lies she told to the British public are clearly as happy with secrecy and lies from right-wingers as they are furious with openness and honesty from left-wingers.

7. Abject Tory hypocrisy (that councillor)If right-wingers really honestly cared about criticising politicians with links to the IRA, why is it that they're perfectly happy to have an ex-IRA terrorist and arms smuggler serving as a Tory councillor in Croydon?

You can find more details on this ex-IRA Tory politician in this article, or by Googling "Maria Gatland" for yourself.8. Boris Johnson's super-hypocrisy

Of all the people resorting to IRA-Corbyn smears, the crap-haired buffoon Boris Johnson surely has to be the most hypocritical.Not only did Boris share a picture of Corbyn with a member of Sinn Féin to "prove" that he met the IRA (refer back to point three and draw your own conclusions about whether Boris is being intensely thick or sickeningly disingenuous) he also claimed that this picture of Corbyn and McGuinness in the 1990s (while the peace process was really beginning to move forward) was proof that Corbyn is untrustworthy!

Even if you agree with Brexit, only the worst kind of political tribalist could possibly try to argue that Boris brazenly lying to the British public like that in order to swing the vote was acceptable and trustworthy conduct.9. Sheer bloody desperationPerhaps the most important point of all is the sheer desperation that these Tory-IRA smears demonstrate.

They don't have any positive policies of their own to promote. They don't have any coherent criticisms of Corbyn's policies. So all they have left is a sickening smear campaign in the desperate hope that a combination of public fact aversion and anti-Irish bigotry is enough to put people off voting in favour of Labour's transformational manifesto.They don't have a single legitimate argument in favour of themselves, or against Labour's policies so they're resorting to the dirtiest muck-slinging tactics possible.

I'll leave you with a quote from Margaret Thatcher about that kind of politics: "I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left." - Margaret Thatcher

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.